Want to know something scary? While the average business redesigns their website every 12 months, less than 40% of organisations use metrics to measure its effectiveness.
Crazy!
But the truth is – there are simple ways to gauge the success of a company website; from how it keeps prospects engaged, to checking conversion rates. I’ve outlined 6 key ways you can increase the B2B lead generation power of your website and continue to measure for success in the future.
1. Enhance the user experience
It’s critical for B2B buyers to be able to access what they want quickly and easily.
Ask yourself the following question about your current website: Is it a product or service-focused website or a user-focused website? i.e. Does your website display your products and services in an orderly fashion or does it offer solutions to your buyers’ specific challenges?
Making your website ‘user-focused’ means organising your site content so visitors can find what they’re looking for quickly and easily. This approach makes your site more functional and in our experience, helps increase time spent and improve visitor-to-prospect conversions.
Other key tips:
- Avoid fancy flash graphics or auto loading videos, as they slow down the browsing experience
- Keep website load time to under 5 seconds
2. Create targeted content
To improve your ranking on Google, it’s vital that you create unique and engaging content on a regular basis (through a blog and by offering downloadable content such as a guide or whitepaper)
Ensure your content follows these rules:
1. It answers a genuine prospect challenge
2. It’s tied back to a relevant and attractive offer or call to action
3. It’s optimised for and builds upon your targeted keywords
An ideal way to start planning your content delivery is to perform a content audit to see where you have gaps through the sales funnel.
Offering relevant content that attracts attention and shares will ultimate boost traffic to your website, increase conversions and result in more inbound links.
3. Convert website visitors to prospects
It is important to think about the user journey each prospect will take and what is required for converting them into a lead. Make each step clear and logical, like using smart calls to action on every page that lead visitors to landing pages. Once they’ve engaged with you by downloading content, provide them with an irresistible offer (like a free demo, consultation or webinar) to keep them moving through the sales funnel.
4. Get found by Google
Inbound links are key for driving more traffic to your website and proving your online authority to Google’s search crawlers (not to mention pushing up your search rankings).
But it’s still important to consider your onsite SEO strategy. To ensure that Google properly indexes your website, make sure you’re:
– Creating unique, accurate and keyword consistent page titles
– Making use of the ‘description’ meta tag, for every site page!
– Inserting relevant keywords in your URLs
– Offering an optimised site navigation (rule: under four clicks to access useful content)
– Using image alt tags
Our pals at Moz outline the ‘perfectly optimised page’ here:
5. Get more exposure through social media
The next step is to ensure that you’re promoting and sharing this content with key stakeholders in your industry.
Give your content the exposure it deserves by encouraging all customer facing staff, plus your clients and partners to share your industry knowledge on social media platforms. For B2B businesses, you’ll probably have the most luck on LinkedIn, via your company page and relevant active LinkedIn Groups. You can also try Twitter by taking advantage of relevant trending topics and appropriate hash tags.
Make it as easy as possible to share content on your site. A great plug-in to install is ‘AddThis’ which allows you to track the amount of shares for every piece of content on your site.
Redesigning your B2B website is a great way to kick off a new inbound marketing strategy: with a persona-focused site and relevant content being produced regularly, you could be well on your way to attract, and convert the right type of leads.
If you still need some help driving leads through your website, why not sign up for our free webinar: How to generate B2B sales leads through your website.
